A new gait phase detection system for continuous monitoring based on wireless sensorized insoles is presented. The system can be used in gait analysis mobile applications, and it is designed for real-time demarcation of gait phases. The system employs pressure sensors to assess the force exerted by each foot during walking. A fuzzy rule-based inference algorithm is implemented on a smartphone and used to detect each of the gait phases based on the sensor signals. Additionally, to provide a solution that is insensitive to perturbations caused by non-walking activities, a probabilistic classifier is employed to discriminate walking forward from other low-level activities, such as turning, walking backwards, lateral walking, etc. The combination of these two algorithms constitutes the first approach towards a continuous gait assessment system, by means of the avoidance of non-walking influences.

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a b s t r a c tThis manuscript presents an infrastructure that contributes to ubiquitous information. Advances in Ambient Intelligence may help to provide us with the right information at the right time, in an appropriate manner and through the most suitable device for each situation. It is therefore crucial for such devices to have contextual information; that is, to know the person or persons in need of information, the environment, and the available devices and services. All of this information, in appropriate models, can provide a simplified view of the real world and let the system act more like a human and, consequently, more intelligently. A suitable context model is not enough; proactive user interface adaptation is necessary to offer personalized information to the user. In this paper, we present mechanisms for the management of contextual information, reasoning techniques and adaptable user interfaces to support visualization services, providing functionality to make decisions about what and how available information can be offered. Additionally, we present the ViMos framework, an infrastructure to generate context-powered information visualization services dynamically.

Assistive technologies can improve the quality of life of people diagnosed with different forms of social communication disorders. We report on the design and evaluation of an affective avatar aimed at engaging the user in a social interaction with the purpose of assisting in communication therapies. A human-avatar taxonomy is proposed to assist the design of affective avatars aimed at addressing social communication disorder. The avatar was evaluated with 30 subjects to assess how effectively it conveys the desired emotion and elicits empathy from the user. Results provide evidence that users become used to the avatar after a number of interactions, and they perceive the defined behavior as being logical. The users' interactions with the avatar entail affective reactions, including the mimic emotions that users felt, and establish a preliminary ground truth about prototypic empathic interactions with avatars that is being used to train learning algorithms to support social communication disorder evaluation.

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BackgroundFrailty is a health condition related to aging and dependence. A reduction in or delay of the frailty state can improve the quality of life of the elderly. However, providing frailty assessments can be difficult because many factors must be taken into account. Usually, measurement of these factors is performed in a noncentralized manner. Additionally, the lack of quantitative methods for analysis makes it impossible for the diagnosis to be as complete or as objective as it should be.ObjectiveTo develop a centralized mobile system to conduct elderly frailty assessments in an accurate and objective way using mobile phone capabilities.MethodsThe diagnosis of frailty includes two fundamental aspects: the analysis of gait activity as the main predictor of functional disorders, and the study of a set of frailty risk factors from patient records. Thus, our system has several stages including gathering information about gait using accelerometer-enabled mobile devices, collecting values of frailty factors, performing analysis through similarity comparisons with previous data, and displaying the results for frailty on the mobile devices in a formalized way.ResultsWe developed a general mechanism to assess the frailty state of a group of elders by using mobile devices as supporting tools. In collaboration with geriatricians, two studies were carried out on a group of 20 elderly patients (10 men and 10 women), previously selected from a nursing home. Frailty risk factors for each patient were collected at three different times over the period of a year. In the first study, data from the group of patients were used to determine the frailty state of a new incoming patient. The results were valuable for determining the degree of frailty of a specific patient in relation to other patients in an elderly population. The most representative similarity degrees were between 73.4% and 71.6% considering 61 frailty factors from 64 patient instances. Additionally, from the provided results, a physician could group the elders by their degree of similarity influencing their care and treatment. In the second study, the same mobile tool was used to analyze the frailty syndrome from a nutritional viewpoint on 10 patients of the initial group during 1 year. Data were acquired at three different times, corresponding to three assessments: initial, spontaneous, and after protein supplementation. The subsequent analysis revealed a general deterioration of the subset of elders from the initial assessment to the spontaneous assessment and also an improvement of biochemical and anthropometric parameters in men and women from the spontaneous assessment to the assessment after the administration of a protein supplement.ConclusionsThe problem of creating a general frailty index is still unsolved. However, in recent years, there has been an increase in the amount of research on this subject. Our studies took advantage of mobile device features (accelerometer sensors, wireless communication capabilities, and processing capacities among others) t...

In this paper, we present a proposal for Patients' Mobile Monitoring. This framework enables the definition and generation of profiles, modules and communication structures between each of the measuring devices and the mobile phone depending on the kind of condition and the measuring values of the patient. We use patterns to allow the generation of self-control modules and patient profiles. These patterns establish relations between each module. With patient's measured data, patient profile and modules, the framework generates an application for the doctor and the patient in a mobile phone. These applications allow the monitoring, patient self-control and the communication between the patient and the doctor. Moreover, as an important study case, we present a mobile monitoring system which allows patients with diabetes to have a constant control of their glucose tendency as well as direct communication with their doctor.

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